Nintendo Is Suing Switch Emulator Yuzu Over Tears Of The Kingdom Piracy

thegamer.com:

Nintendo has a very deserved reputation for going after anything it deems a threat to its business and IP with a mountain of legal challenges. It's shut down countless fan-made projects, ruined a hacker's life, and it's constantly fighting a losing battle against emulation and piracy. Its latest efforts on that front now have its sights squared solely on the popular Switch emulator Yuzu.

First reported by Game File creator and reporter Stephen Totilo, it's been revealed that Nintendo is suing the creators of Yuzu for helping people "unlawfully circumvent" Nintendo's software encryption and facilitating piracy. It's also claimed that Yuzu's creators have accessed Nintendo Switch titles via a hacked console and made copies of each one, adding a DMCA violation and copyright infringement to the pile of charges as well.

Nintendo doesn't really get into specifics about the affected games, but one title that does appear in the lawsuit quite frequently is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. According to Nintendo, its claims that Yuzu was responsible for one million copies of the title being downloaded prior to the game's official release, and that the creators of Yuzu were largely responsible for the spoilers shared online during that time.

It's worth noting that emulators aren't actually illegal, but piracy very much is. There's nothing illegal about creating and distributing an emulator, which is likely why Nintendo is using Tears of the Kingdom piracy as justification for the lawsuit.

Nintendo is also claiming that Yuzu's Patreon support doubled during that same time frame, and that the creators of the emulator have been profiting from piracy, even though they're not directly involved. Getting money off the back of an emulator, while not technically illegal, was always going to risk these kinds of legal challenges, so it's honeslty not surprising that Nintendo has sued given its history of legal battles.

As for what Nintendo wants from the lawsuit, it's currently